Low life | 1 December 2016

My mother is a bore magnet. They travel from miles around to sit in the chair opposite hers and tell her every last detail of their lives in a protracted monologue and then they leave. It’s like a surgery. One after another they appear at the door, bursting with a narrative of their incredible lives. If they can’t get there in person, they ring her up and talk about themselves on the phone for hours on end. I suppose it must be a kind of innocence to find the minutiae of your daily life so consistently remarkable that you simply must tell it to a third party. Perhaps I should envy them.

I walked in the open front door the other day to find my mother and one of her client bores standing in the hallway. They had gone into the kitchen to make a pot of tea, found there a female pheasant and two adolescent chicks, and retreated to the hall. Even the startling presence in the kitchen of wild pheasants hadn’t deflected my mother’s visitor from her tale about her latest battle with the customer-services department of a small manufacturer of pill-organisers. My mother was leaning to the side and peering tentatively around the kitchen door and her visitor wasn’t missing an opportunity of speaking directly into her uppermost ear and telling it what she had said to him, and what he had said to her, when she finally got through on Monday afternoon. Or was it Tuesday? Hang on a minute. No, it was Monday. It was definitely Monday because that was the day she finally had her appointment through from the gynaecologist about her prolapse. Has she mentioned that it has all gone south again? Indeed she has.